Chapter Ten
The call came at noon.
Muddy was watching Tessa run her barrel pattern when Hollow's voice crackled through the radio—tight, controlled, the particular cadence that meant bad news delivered efficiently.
"Three-front assault. Carrier's hitting us everywhere at once."
Muddy was moving before the sentence finished. "Talk to me."
"Jennings warehouse on the south side—sabotage crew, probably six men. River-road property we've been watching—another crew, unknown numbers. And the waterfront access point at Greenville—heavy equipment blockade."
Three simultaneous strikes. Coordinated. Professional.
Glenn Carrier wasn't making the same mistake Hebert had. The operations manager was applying construction scheduling to warfare—hitting multiple targets at once, stretching the Destroyers thin, making them choose which position to defend.
"Where's Tatum?" Muddy asked.
"Not on site. Carrier's running this personally."
Smart. Tatum was keeping his hands clean while his project manager did the work. If this went sideways, Carrier would take the fall and Tatum would walk away with deniability.
But it also meant Carrier was exposed.
"I'm heading to the waterfront," Muddy said. "That's where he'll be—overseeing the main operation, keeping the timeline on track."
"I'll take the warehouse," Hollow responded. "Crossroad's already moving on the river-road property."
"Brothers?"
"Enough. We're stretched, but we'll hold."
Muddy killed the radio and found Tessa already dismounting, her face set with the particular determination he'd come to recognize.
"I heard," she said. "Three attacks."
"Carrier's trying to break us across multiple fronts."
"What do you need?"
He should tell her to stay. Should insist she remain at the compound where it was safe, where the fighting couldn't reach her. But he'd made her a promise—that he wouldn't try to change who she was, wouldn't ask her to hide while others fought for her.
And she could shoot. He'd seen her with a rifle at the fish camp.
"You stay close to me," he said. "Do exactly what I say. If I tell you to run—"
"I run." Her jaw tightened. "But I'm not staying behind while you fight my war."
"It's not your war."
"The hell it isn't." She grabbed his arm. "They came for me first. Everything Tatum's done since then has been because I wouldn't back down. This is my fight as much as anyone's."
Muddy read her the way he read the river—watching the current, the pressure, the absolute certainty in her eyes.
She wasn't backing down. Wasn't hiding. Wasn't anything other than exactly who she was.
Mine, he thought. This fierce, stubborn woman is mine.
"Stay close," he said. "And stay alive."
"Same to you."
The waterfront access point was chaos.
Carrier had positioned heavy equipment across the main road—a dozer and two dump trucks blocking any approach from the highway. Behind the barricade, maybe eight men waited with the particular tension of construction workers who'd been pressed into security roles.
They weren't fighters. They were laborers holding hammers and crowbars, scared and out of their depth.
But Glenn Carrier stood behind them with a clipboard, directing the operation like it was a job site that needed managing. The operations manager who coordinated sabotage and kept development timelines on track, treating the blockade like another line item to check off.
He hadn't learned anything from Hebert's death.
"He's got the road blocked," Tessa said from beside Muddy. They'd positioned on a rise overlooking the waterfront, hidden in brush that the construction crews hadn't thought to watch. "How do we get through?"
"We don't." Muddy studied the blockade, reading the position the way he'd read a thousand river approaches. "The road's his strongest point. He's got equipment, numbers, clear sight lines."
"Then what?"
Muddy pointed toward the water. "The river."
Tessa followed his gaze. The Mississippi ran slow and brown behind the barricade, the waterfront access point sitting on a spit of land that jutted into the current. From the road, it looked defensible. From the water...
"He stationed his lightest crew on the river side," Muddy said. "Three men, maybe four. He thinks the river is a boundary, not a highway."
"Because he's not a river man."
"No." Muddy's smile was cold. "He's not."
They moved.
Muddy led Tessa down the rise and along the tree line until they reached the water.
Two brothers—Burial and Levee—were already waiting, having approached from different angles.
The four of them waded into the Mississippi, the current tugging at their legs, the water brown and warm with Delta summer.
Carrier's river-side crew never saw them coming.
Muddy came out of the water like the current rising, silent and inevitable. The first man went down before he could shout—a hand over his mouth, a blade across his throat, the body sliding into the Mississippi without a sound.
Burial took the second. Levee took the third.
The fourth ran.
Tessa shot him.
The crack of the rifle echoed across the waterfront, and suddenly everyone knew the fight had changed. Carrier's laborers spun toward the river side, confusion and fear spreading through them as they realized they'd been flanked.
"Push!" Muddy shouted.
The brothers surged forward. The laborers broke—construction workers, not soldiers, folding under an assault from a direction they hadn't expected.
Some ran. Some dropped their weapons and raised their hands.
A few tried to fight and learned quickly that hammers and crowbars weren't enough against men who'd spent their lives solving problems with violence.
Muddy moved through them like water through a channel—unstoppable, patient, the violence coming in waves that couldn't be rushed but couldn't be stopped either.
A man swung a crowbar at his head; Muddy ducked, caught the arm, broke it.
Another came at him with a knife; Muddy redirected the thrust and used the man's own momentum to put him in the dirt.
And through it all, Glenn Carrier stood behind his equipment barricade, watching his operation collapse with the particular confusion of a project manager whose timeline had just been destroyed.
"Carrier!" Muddy's voice cut through the chaos.
The operations manager looked up. His eyes met Muddy's across the killing ground, and something shifted in his expression—the realization, finally, that this wasn't a construction-site problem that could be managed.
Carrier ran.
He scrambled over the dozer's tracks, heading for a truck parked behind the blockade. An escape vehicle, probably, part of the contingency plan he'd built into his schedule.
Muddy followed.
He caught Carrier at the truck door, grabbed him by the collar, and slammed him face-first into the metal. The operations manager's glasses shattered. Blood streamed from his nose.
"Tatum sent you," Muddy said. "Sent you to dam the river at three points, stretch us thin, break our lines."
"I was following orders—"
"That's what Hebert said." Muddy spun Carrier around, pinning him against the truck. "Right before he died in the mud."
Carrier's eyes went wide. The project-management calm was gone, replaced by raw terror. "I can give you Tatum. I know everything—his schedule, his finances, his plans for the corridor—"
"I already know his plans." Muddy's voice dropped to something cold and final. "I've been reading his current since the first morning. I know where it's going, where it'll break, where it'll drown anyone who doesn't respect the flow."
"Please—"
"You came to block our river." Muddy's hands closed around Carrier's throat. "You sent crews to damage our property, threaten our people, disrupt our operations. And you thought you could manage it like a construction schedule."
"I didn't—"
"The river doesn't follow schedules." Muddy pressed harder. "And neither do I."
Glenn Carrier died against the door of his escape vehicle, his project-management precision finally meeting something it couldn't coordinate. Muddy held him there until the light faded from his eyes, until the operations manager who'd kept Tatum's development on track stopped twitching.
Then he let the body fall.
The aftermath was chaos.
Hollow's team had held the warehouse—two brothers wounded, but the sabotage crew scattered. Crossroad had secured the river-road property with minimal casualties. The three-front assault that was supposed to break the Destroyers had collapsed in less than an hour.
Muddy found Tessa at the edge of the waterfront, rifle still in her hands, eyes scanning for threats that had already been eliminated.
"It's over," he said.
She lowered the weapon. Her face was pale but steady, her hands not shaking despite what she'd just done. She'd shot a man. Watched Muddy kill another. And she was still standing.
"The one I shot," she said. "He was running."
"He was running to get reinforcements." Muddy moved closer. "You did what you had to do."
"I know." She met his eyes. "That's what scares me."
He pulled her into his arms, holding her against his chest, feeling her heart hammer beneath her ribs. She was wound tight—tighter than usual—but she wasn't breaking. Wasn't falling apart.
My woman, he thought. Strong enough to survive this life.
"Carrier's dead," he said quietly. "Tatum's lost his foreman and his project manager. He's running out of people to send."
"So it's almost over?"
"Almost." Muddy pulled back, looked at her face. "He's got one more enforcer. Beau Marchand—the one who grabbed your horse that first morning. Young, aggressive, willing to target what people love."
"And after Marchand?"
"After Marchand, there's just Tatum." Muddy's jaw tightened. "And then this ends."
Tessa nodded slowly. The fear was still there—he could see it in her eyes—but it was controlled now. Managed. The same way she managed the terror of running a barrel pattern at full speed, knowing that one wrong move could end everything.
"I need to check on the horse," she said.
"Compound's secure. Brothers are holding the gates."
"I know." She touched his face with one bloodstained hand. "But I need to see him. Need to... ground myself."
"I understand."
She walked toward Burial's truck, and Muddy watched her go—the barrel racer who'd shot a man to protect his flank, who'd waded through the Mississippi with a rifle in her hands, who'd proven herself in ways that most people never had to.
Mine.
The word kept coming back. The certainty of it, the possessive weight.
She was his. And he was hers.
And when this was over—when Tatum and Marchand were in the ground and the river road was safe again—they'd figure out what came next.
Together.
The river had given him something worth reaching for.
He wasn't letting go.